Kia ora, I'm Joel.

I'm a senior engineer at Starboard. I lead platform and infrastructure for maritime intelligence software used in 30+ countries.

I started on a support desk in Hastings in 2019. Since then I've automated a power grid upgrade, modernised AWS accounts for more than a dozen customers, built weather data pipelines at MetService, and joined Starboard as its first infrastructure hire. I wrote the plan, built most of the platform, moved production onto it, and hired the people who now run it with me.

Most days that means Kubernetes, Terraform and GitOps on GCP, after years on AWS and Azure. I also write TypeScript and Python, and I designed the just-in-time production access that got us through a defence customer audit.

Two things have my attention at the moment. One is mentoring: two of the interns I worked with are now associate engineers who own parts of the platform. The other is coding agents, and how they can plan an infrastructure change while a person still makes every decision. I write up what I learn here.